HELP. Remote Access (fraudulent)

my dad has just been off the phone saying i need to come to their house as my mums pc has loads of errors etc,

a guy phoned my mum up and said their computer was needing fixed, so by the sounds of it, they've used remote access to get into her pc.

my dad phoned me on his moblie phone, so i said to him to shut the PC down and unplug it from the net.


after giving my mum a rollicking about being so naive, what security measures do i need to do to make sure this guy can't get access to my mums PC


any help/info would be appreciated

thanks tews, i'll go up there now.

think i'll maybe just load another image from a wee while ago if thats all thats needed.

There's currently a big phone scam going on, where someone calls and cons the PC owner into setting their PC up for remote access and then the caller accesses their PC and installs a Trojan, Spyware or Virus.

One thing I do as standard procedure when setting up a PC, is disable all the Remote stuff and then make sure the Firewall is ON. That pretty well tightens up the PC against outside interference.

I also install AVG 9.0 FREE, which has very good AV protection as well as Trojan and Spyware protection. As an added layer of protection, I also install Spybot Search & Destroy and Spyware Blaster, to protect the PC against Spyware intrusion.

The computers I set up this way just NEVER have problems with viruses, trojans or spyware. I use the same security package here at home on all my own PC's.

Good Luck,
The Doctor

If I were you, I'd copy off the user data to an external hdd, then nuke the hard drive with DBAN.

Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing

I'd then install win7 and my apps from scratch. Also have a good resident antivirus and on-demand scan with free malwarebytes.

As for the backed up data, would try and read on an isolated system, then rebuild.

Thats a lot of hard work but well worth it.

And yes, change ALL your passwords.

My computer is suddenly got HDD! I have an Acer 5532 and it runs fine for a few minutes, then all of a sudden ATI and every imagineable window starts popping up. Even the start button begins to vibrate, sort of. Windows 7 home edition.

Then a window will freeze. Then open up. I don't use a mouse, but the touchpad on the computer.

It's weird.

Bjproc, what kind of net access your mum uses? If it's DSL or cable, I would recommend using a router with hardware (NAT) firewall. This way, if she uses any particular form of remote access, you can set up port forwarding, otherwise most external connections would be blocked automatically.

On the PC, I would follow DrWho and disable most of the Remote stuff - Remote Desktop, Remote Registry, etc. I would also disable NetBIOS. And I would install a good security suite, or a combination of a software firewall and anti-virus/anti-spyware. The firewall I would run at least for some time in the "verbal" mode, i.e. I would get a pop-up window anytime any app wants to connect to the net or anything outside my PC requests a connection. This way you can be sure what's going on with your PC exactly.

hi, thanks all.

what i've done is reinstalled an image for 10 months ago

i have on avira premium, zonealarm free, malewarebytes, spywareguard, she also has a sagem router from Sky broadband (UK)